You grew up in England and have written three books on Chinese cuisine. How did you first get interested in the country and its cooking?

My interest in China started with a job at the BBC, and I went to live there as a British Council scholar in 1994. My interest in cooking dates back as far as I can remember! I actually chose to study in Sichuan, partly because I’d had a fabulous lunch in the capital, Chengdu, on a previous trip, and also because Chinese people were always telling me about the excellence of Sichuanese cuisine. It more than lived up to its reputation, and I started learning to cook almost without thinking about it. During my year at the university, I watched Sichuanese friends cook at home, and talked my way into the kitchens of several small restaurants. Later, I enrolled as a trainee chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, which I suppose was the beginning of my serious apprenticeship.

In your piece about Hangzhou’s Dragon Well Manor restaurant, you mention that the style of cooking in the Lower Yangtze region, where Hangzhou lies, is a bit harder to characterize than styles like Sichuan or Hunan. Elizabeth David (I think it was) once divided France into cuisines based on butter and ones based on olive oil—is it possible to do something similar for China? If you were trying to sketch us a quick map of Chinese food what would be the key divisions, in terms of styles and ingredients?

The main dividing line in Chinese cuisine is between the wheat-eating north and the rice-eating south. Beyond that, it gets more complicated. The most widespread convention is to talk of four great regional cuisines.

In the north you have lu cai (Shandong cuisine) or jing cai (Beijing cuisine), which is based on wheat made into a vast array of pastas, breads, and dumplings. The influence of northern nomads is felt in the use of mutton, and typical seasonings include dark Shanxi vinegar, garlic, and chilli. A narrower range of vegetables are used than in the south; cabbage and da cong (a member of the allium family that resembles a rather tender leek). Shandong cuisine, with its expensive dried seafoods and legendary soups, is the haute cuisine of the north and was at the heart of imperial-court cookery. In Beijing, you also find Manchu influences, for example in sweetmeats like sha qi ma, made from deep-fried dough strands bound together with syrup.

In the east, there is huaiyang or weiyang cai (Yangzhou cuisine), the broader school into which Hangzhou cooking falls. This is associated with the refined and cultured lives of the Chinese literati, and characterized by exquisite cutting skills, subtle but varied flavors, aquatic foods like crab and shrimp, and the use of local preserves such as Zhenjiang vinegar, Shaoxing wine,and Jinhua ham. Red-braising is one of the favorite cooking methods of this region.

The western school is chuan cai, or Sichuanese cuisine, notable for its lavish use of chillies and Sichuan peppers, and its bold, complex flavors (like yu xiang wei, fish-fragrant flavor, a punchy combination of pickled chilli, ginger, garlic, and scallion, with a bit of sweet-and-sour). And in the South is yue cai, or Cantonese cooking, with its extremely fresh ingredients, light, bright flavors, precise cooking, and, of course, a thriving dim-sum tradition. According to people in other parts of China, it’s the Cantonese who “eat everything”: they are very adventurous in their ingredients.

Of course, this is still a terrible oversimplification: dig a little deeper and you find cuisines like the Hunanese (xiang cai) and Fujianese (min cai), other styles like Hakka and Buddhist vegetarian, the diverse culinary traditions of the ethnic minorities (highlighted in Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s latest book), and countless extremely local specialities. And, of course, there are no real borders between different styles: they are very fluid, with plenty of mutual influences and cross-fertilization.

Your article is a profile of a restaurant but also of its owner, Dai Jianjun, who has made it his mission to use traditional methods for every stage of the process—cultivation, foraging, cooking, and the act of dining itself. Is he still unique, or do you see a growing movement in China away from processed foods and toward the localist style that has become so popular in the U.S?

For obvious reasons, people in China are becoming increasingly worried about food safety. For several years now there has been a fashion for nong jia le—rustic-style restaurants—some of which produce at least some of their own food. Many people like to get their hands on farmhouse eggs and home-reared meat and poultry from friends in the countryside when they can, and lü se shi pin (green foods) are becoming more popular. I’ve never met anyone who takes the pursuit of “natural” foods and traditional cooking to quite the same lengths as A Dai—but China is a vast country and there may be others! I certainly see him as a trend-setter—ahead of the game, but tuning in to an emerging movement that can only grow.

Chinese food has been popular with Americans for a long time, but has perhaps had a harder time reinventing itself as upscale fare than, say, Italian food, Japanese food, or tapas. Why do you think this might be?

The early purveyors of Chinese food to Americans were not chefs, but immigrants looking for any way to make a living. Centuries-old Western stereotypes of Chinese food as being frighteningly exotic must also have encouraged them to develop a safe, sanitized, and almost childish version of “Chinese cuisine” that appealed to American tastes. And that’s where it got stuck for a long time, while more recent arrivals were better able to take advantage of the growing openness and sophistication of American consumers. Now that there are plenty of discerning, well-educated, and well-heeled Chinese people living in the U.S., conditions must be much better for the development of Chinese cuisine—the main problem at the moment, as I understand it, is that Chinese chefs find it hard to get U.S. visas.

What’s the attitude among the Chinese people you know toward Western cuisines?

Just as many Americans speak of the diverse culinary styles of China as one “Chinese cuisine,” most Chinese tend to conflate the culinary cultures of the entire Western world into one “Western” tradition, with little awareness of the distinctive styles of, say, French and Italian cuisines, let alone anything more local. When I lived in Chengdu in the nineteen-nineties, it was rare for people there to have tasted “Western food” of any kind; even now the range available is limited, unless you are enormously rich and living in Beijing or Shanghai. And just as many Westerners think of Chinese food as “junky” or “gloopy,” many Chinese people think that “Western food” is “simple” (jian dan) and “monotonous” (dan diao). There’s a chapter about my disastrous attempts to challenge these stereotypes in my latest book, “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper,” in the chapter “Only Barbarians Eat Salad.”

Do you have a favorite Chinese cuisine?

Sichuanese cuisine is my first love, and I never tire of it!

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